Ian Tattersall

 This passage is adapted from Ian Tattersall, Masters of the 
Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins. ©2012 by Ian 
Tattersall.
Some of the most notable technological advances 
in hominid history, including the domestication of 
fire, the invention of compound tools, and the 
building of shelters, predated language. Such 
achievements are impressive indeed. But language 
facilitated the imposition of symbolic information 
processing upon older cognitive processes. And this 
added an entirely new dimension to the way in which 
hominids saw the world, and eventually reimagined 
it.
That this momentous event took place in
Africa—the continent in which we find the first fossil 
evidence of creatures who looked just like us, and 
(somewhat later) the earliest archaeological 
suggestions of symbolic activities—is corroborated 
by a recent study of the sounds used in spoken 
languages around the world. The study of 
comparative linguistics makes it clear that languages 
have evolved much as organisms have done, with 
descendant versions branching away from the 
ancestral forms while still retaining for some time the 
imprint of their common origins. Many scientists 
have accordingly used the differentiation of 
languages as a guide to the spread of mankind across 
the globe. And in doing this they have traditionally 
concentrated on the words that make up those 
languages. But this has proved a tricky endeavor, for 
individual words change quite rapidly over time: so 
rapidly that beyond a time depth of about five 
thousand years, or ten at the very most, it turns out 
to he fairly hopeless to look for substantial traces of 
relationship. As a result, while language has indeed 
proven useful in tracing the movement of peoples 
around the Earth over the last few thousand years, 
linguists have been somewhat stymied when it comes 
to its very early evolution.
Cognitive psychologist Quentin Atkinson has 
recently suggested an alternative. According to 
Atkinson, in seeking the origins of language we are 
better off looking not at words as a whole, but at the 
individual sound components—the phonemes—of 
which they are comprised. This makes sense, because 
the phonemes are much more bound by biology than 
are the ideas that their combinations represent. And 
when Atkinson looked at the distribution of
phonemes in languages around the world, he found a 
remarkable pattern. The farther away from Africa 
you go, the fewer phonemes are typically used in 
producing words. Some of the very ancient “click” 
languages of Africa, spoken by people with very deep 
genetic roots, have over a hundred phonemes. 
English has about 45; and in Hawaii, one of the last 
places on Earth to be colonized by people, there are 
only 13.1 Atkinson attributes this pattern to what is 
known as “serial founder effect”: a phenomenon, well 
known to population geneticists, that is due to the 
drop in effective population size each time a 
descendant group buds off and spreads away from an 
ancestral one. With each successive budding, 
genetic—and apparently also phonemic—diversity 
diminishes.
The signal of this effect in the five hundred or so 
languages analyzed by Atkinson is weaker than the 
one found in the genes, but this difference is
plausibly due to the rapidity with which languages 
evolve. The key thing, though, is that the genetic and 
phonemic patterns are essentially the same, and that 
both point to an origin in Africa. Atkinson’s analysis 
suggests that the convergence point may be in 
southwestern Africa, which is also in line with one 
recent genetic study. And his results imply not only 
that modern Homo sapiens originated in a single 
place, but also that the same thing was true for 
language (or at least, for the form of language that 
survives today). In which case, there is a strong 
argument for a fundamental synergy between biology 
and language in the rapid takeover of the world by 
articulate modern humans.
1 The author refers to the Polynesian language Hawaiian, the main 
language spoken by the people of Hawaii prior to their contact 
with Europeans in the eighteenth century.

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